Deadly Traditions, page 2
“That doesn’t seem fair,” Nico observed, crossing his arms over his chest.
I patted his shoulder. “What, you can’t hop off those justice scales even for a gingerbread house contest, detective?”
He gave me an annoyed look, but before he could comment, Mrs. Daniels broke in. “Look at this. Bet you’ve never seen an entry like this before.”
Nico and I watched as Mrs. Daniels reached for the lip of the roof, pulling it toward her to reveal several golden hinges allowing it to open and close. Curious, we peered into the house, and I gasped when I saw the interior was decorated just like her real home a few streets over.
There were tiny chocolate and pretzel and candy-created items that were intended to be small replicas of her decor and furniture. The rug they’d gotten from Turkey seemed to be made from a facedown chocolate bar with golden piped icing in swirling patterns. There was the mirror they’d brought home from Spain—more golden icing had been piped delicately around the edges, and something shiny mimicked the glass that surely couldn’t be edible. That was one rule I remembered—everything used must be edible.
Nico noticed at the same time. “What’d you use for the glass of the mirror? Or the windows, for that matter?”
“It’s made of sugar,” she confided with a rueful smile. “They use sugar glass in the movies when someone falls through a window, you know.”
Something else shiny caught my eye, and I was startled, not knowing how I’d missed it before. “Is the chandelier sugar glass too?”
“Yes, totally made of sugar. It’s an exact replica of the one in our foyer. Isn’t it grand?”
Mrs. Daniels’s boasting had drawn a crowd of people so close that Nico and I found ourselves with no choice but to scoot nearer to the table—and each other. I didn’t know if it was the fact that people were crowding around me in a way that suggested they had no idea what a personal space bubble was or if it was my proximity to the tall, dark, and handsome detective, but suddenly I felt flushed, and my breathing grew too fast to hide. I had to get out of there.
Ever observant, Nico took one look at me and parted the sea of onlookers with his large, lean form, allowing me an exit as he followed after me. “That was intense,” he said after we made it into the center of the room. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. I just didn’t want one of them to push me into the table and be responsible for ruining Mrs. Daniels’s house. I bet it cost her a fortune, and now I have a feeling she’ll probably win over Betty.”
He looked down at me with narrowed eyes. “Do you think that’s fair though? Seems to me she’s flirting with cheating by hiring it out.”
I agreed with him, but I liked to disagree with him more. Even if only to watch his nostrils flare with annoyance. Call me crazy, but I found it pretty cute. Shrugging, I played with one of the silly white puffs on my ugly Christmas sweater that was supposed to represent snow. “Eh, it’s not Mrs. Daniels’s fault nobody thought to add it to the rules. If someone has an issue with it, I bet it’ll be a new rule next year.”
Nico harrumphed but didn’t comment further. Then his whole posture changed as my brother walked up with my best friend in tow. Nico nodded at them and took a deliberate step away from me, tucking his hands into the pockets of his slacks. Why he wore slacks and a button-down under his crisp New York fashion coat to a small-town gingerbread house competition was beyond me. But then again, he also wore a full Men in Black-ish suit as one of the few detectives in Pine Lakes instead of the simple polo and slacks the rest of them wore, so I shouldn’t really be that surprised.
“Haze,” Lexi said, grabbing my arm with wide eyes. “Have you seen Cory’s mom’s house? It looks just like the one they live in! I can’t even!”
I nodded and tossed a look over my shoulder where the crowd was still gathered around it. As I swung back to look at Lexi again, my attention was snagged by Betty, who looked as bitter as a coffee bean. Well, as bitter as a coffee bean before we got ahold of them at the Busy Bean, of course. Because once we roasted and ground and brewed them, they were smooth and full-bodied.
“Betty does not look happy,” I said in a low tone.
“She looks like she wants to take a sledgehammer to the thing,” Ryan added, then slid his gaze over Nico. “Didn’t think this would be your scene.”
“Your grandma invited me,” Nico replied with a shrug.
Ryan’s eyes flared as he looked at me, and I held my hands up. “I know. Shocked me too.”
“She’s so weird. Where is she anyway? I haven’t seen her or Mom all night.”
I scanned the faces of the crowd, coming up empty. “Mom said Joe had an emergency job on the other side of town, and they were going to wait for him and head over together. They should be here soon.”
My mom’s fiancé, Joe, was an electrician. He worked decent hours most days because his clients were commercial property owners, but when the odd emergency popped up, he’d been known to pull an all-nighter to get the job done.
Some people would probably find that kind of thing exhausting, but as someone who’d grown up watching her mom and grandparents run their own business in the form of our town’s only coffeehouse, it was the only life I knew. And now that we’d opened Bean Around Town as an extension of the Busy Bean’s offerings—and it was my brainchild and totally under my charge—I worked even more than I had before. It was why I didn’t date if I was being honest. Who had time for romance when there were lattes to serve and beans to grind and to-go cups to order? Not me.
“Well, I hope they get here soon so they can get a good look at all of the entries before it’s time to vote,” Lexi said with a pout.
She knew her gingerbread bakery was good, but there were some competitors who’d campaigned for votes for months before this event, and she wasn’t one of them. Sure, in the end, the panel of judges had the final say on the winners, but the public votes factored into their results and almost always resulted in an honorable mention prize if some house they didn’t deem worthy of getting first, second, or third place was highly popular with the voters. No doubt, Lexi was hoping she could at least snag that spot, if nothing else.
“Let’s go finish looking,” I said, nodding toward the side of the room I hadn’t yet made it to. “We’ve only seen the first half.”
Lexi frowned. “You started on that side? We started on the opposite.”
“It’s fine. You go that way, and we’ll go this way, and we’ll meet you by the door when we’re done?” I suggested, hooking a thumb over my shoulder.
Lexi nodded and pranced off, but Ryan lingered for a minute, looking between the two of us with an odd expression on his face. Then he shook his head slightly and followed Lexi when she called out to him. Poor guy. He had no idea my best friend had been pining over him since we were all practically kids, and she didn’t seem to care to let him in on the secret that only I knew.
Hmm. Maybe I should push them into it?
“What are you thinking so hard about?” Nico asked, one perfectly manscaped brow arched. Such a typical New York Italian. I bet he got his hair cut every Friday without fail too.
“Nothing. Let’s go.”
About fifteen minutes later, Nico and I made it to the door right as Lexi and Ryan finished their perusal of the entries. And not a moment too soon, either, because right then, the mayor picked up his mic and cleared his throat before raising it to his ruddy, round face.
“All right, everyone,” Mayor Kingston said into the mic, causing a shriek of feedback to bloody our ears. He winced and glared at his assistant, who’d been helping with the sound system, then waited for her to give him a thumbs up before continuing. “We hope you’ve had time to check out all the entries in this year’s competition. And if you haven’t, well, you should have gotten here sooner because there’s been plenty of time.”
The four of us exchanged looks as a few people chuckled, but clearly, no one thought Mayor Kingston was as amusing as he thought he was.
Where were Gram and Mom? They should have been here by now.
“Now,” he went on, gesturing to the door, “if you’ll please step outside and enjoy some refreshments from Bean Around Town so we can give our wonderful judges time to deliberate, we’ll call you back inside when it’s time to reveal the winners.”
Bodies started moving toward the door in a sea of either excited murmurs or frustrated sighs—depending on how far they’d made it around the room. As the four of us went outside and I started to dash over to the bus so I could start my refreshment dispensing, I jolted when I saw my mom and grandma were already serving the customers who were standing in line. Joe stood chatting with locals with my trusty canine companion, Latte, on her leash beside him.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked as I jumped through the door of Bean Around Town and threw on my apron. “Didn’t you want to go inside and vote?”
Gram scoffed and waved a hand. “I’m not participating in that hogwash this year. We all know who’s gonna win.”
I sent her a wry smile as I squeezed in to help. I loved it when they came in here and we had three generations of Italian women serving coffee and not scrimping on the smiles. This was my happy place, no doubt about it.
“Well,” I said as I picked up a freshly Sharpie’d cup that my mom had just placed on the counter for me to pour hot cocoa into, “you might be surprised this year.”
Chapter 4
After the thirty-minute deliberation from the judges, Mom, Gram, and I closed up the coffee truck and made our way to the seats our friends and family had held for us. The room had been rearranged slightly with the tables scooted back toward the walls so there was more space in the center for chairs. Long partitions had been erected in front of the displays so we couldn’t see whose creations were still sitting in the same place and which ones had been moved to a new table front and center.
They’d used four banners from the mayor’s campaign office to block the sight of the houses that sat behind them. And judging by the fact that there were four of them, I guessed this year’s winning lineup would include an honorable mention after all.
I squeezed Lexi’s hand as she sat—or squirmed really—in the chair next to mine. “This is it. I hope you win!”
“Me too,” she replied, glaring at the four large banners with the mayor’s face prominently displayed on each of them. “You’d think they’d make banners specifically for this event since it’s an annual affair instead of using his campaign signage. I get that they want to reveal the winners one at a time, but ugh, his actual face is annoying enough to look at in 3D. Do we really have to sit here and stare at four more versions of his smug smile?”
Snorting, then coughing in an attempt to cover it, I leaned over to whisper, “Normally, they use those white boxes to cover the winning houses until they’re ready to pull them off one by one. Remember?”
“Oh, right.”
“How much you wanna bet Mrs. Daniels’s house was too big to fit under the box, so they had to improvise in order to avoid a dead giveaway?”
She nodded, and her lips pulled down like she was impressed. “True. But since our town super sleuth is in the audience, it was a dead giveaway anyway, wasn’t it?”
I chuckled. “Guess so, yeah. But I’m special.”
Nico leaned across Ryan, who sat on my other side, keeping his voice low as he said, “Guys, how much you wanna bet they only used those stupid signs so it wouldn’t be obvious the big house won? If they’d used anything else, it’d give it away, right?”
“Good call, man,” Ryan replied, patting his fellow detective on the shoulder before turning to us with a smile that said, “That’s my partner, right there.”
I glared at him—and Nico too—before turning back to Lexi. “I thought of it first.”
“Of course you did, Miss Marple.”
“Let’s kick things off with our honorable mention,” Mayor Kingston said, wrapping his hand around the pole of the banner. “Congratulations to Lexi Cunningham,” he yelled, sliding the banner away with a flourish. “Your bakery in real life is one of our town’s most treasured eateries, and your replica was definitely a favorite with the people tonight.”
Lexi screamed and bounded from her seat, bowing and grinning as the crowd cheered for her. Of course I was the loudest and on my feet, too, even though normally the honorable mention didn’t get a standing ovation. When she returned to her seat holding a hand-painted gingerbread house ornament with the year on it as her prize, I pulled her into my arms and squeezed her tightly.
“Great job,” I said against her neck. “I knew you’d win!”
She let go of me and sat down, cradling the ornament in her hands. “Well, I won something anyway.”
“The most important prize, if you ask me,” I said proudly, slapping my brother’s leg. “Right, Ryan?”
My brother gave Lexi a huge smile. “She’s right. Better to win the vote of the people than to have a bunch of crotchety old folks deciding if it’s good enough.”
“Hey,” Gram said, reaching across Nico to whack him on the back of the head, “I resemble that remark.”
We all laughed and turned back to the mayor as he announced the winner for third place. It was a cute house, I’d give the art teacher from Pine Lakes High that—so if anyone would have an issue with Mrs. Daniels hiring hers out, surely people with artistic talent should be excluded too, right? Well, no, because my bestie was a whiz with icing decorations so that would push her out just the same.
Brushing it off, I joined the rest of the town in clapping for Miss Gormley as she went up to retrieve her twenty-five-dollar cash prize and ten-dollar gift card to the local hardware store. What that had to do with Christmas or gingerbread houses, I didn’t know. But this event’s sponsors rarely fit the theme.
“Maybe you should sponsor the event next year,” Lexi whispered to me. “You can do ten-dollar Busy Bean gift cards. I bet you make enough cash having the truck outside to more than make up for it, and it’ll bring you more business.”
Since Lexi owned and operated her own small business with the bakery, I never doubted her sound mind on the topic. But this was a great idea and would surely be more exciting to the winners than a gift card to the hardware store.
“Good idea,” I replied with an air kiss. “I’ll tell the mayor later before he books someone else.”
“And now for our first- and second-place winners,” Mayor Kingston said, suddenly looking a little ill. “This was a hotly debated situation, as I’m sure you can imagine once you get a look at the winners. But in the end, we had to go with the best house, regardless of how … complicated it made our judges’ deliberations.”
The mayor paused as he looked pointedly at one judge in particular. Mr. Smythe—the elementary school teacher who appeared to have had a stick up his rear since about 1973, if you asked me. The resentful scowl on his pudgy face couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d held up a sign that read I didn’t win this argument, and I’m highly offended by it.
“Ah, I bet we all already know what’s up,” Lexi muttered.
I nodded. “I thought it took them longer than usual to choose the winners. They normally don’t need so long to sort it out.”
“Right, because Betty gets their commitment to vote for her before the leaves have even fallen around here.”
I giggled as Mayor Kingston moved to the banner in front of second place, shooting Lexi a look as Betty’s very cute gingerbread house came into view. It was a one-story ranch style home with a large courtyard in the center. She’d cleverly used candies shaped like LEGO bricks to create a colorful fountain in the center with strings of sour candy cascading from the top to represent the water.
The crowd’s reaction to Betty winning second place instead of first was a mixed bag. Some cheered and yelled things like ’bout time, which was rude even if we were all thinking it. Others grumbled that it wasn’t fair for someone to hire out their build and dethrone a woman with real talent. And even though I agreed that it was about time someone else won the title of Gingerbread House Champion this year, I kind of understood the unrest over it too.
It was a tough subject to figure out, but fine. In the last year, my family’s historical coffee shop, the Busy Bean, had been engulfed in flames thanks to the work of an arsonist with a bone to pick. And then not long after that, my ex-boyfriend had been murdered, and I’d been the prime suspect for a time. It’s been quite the year, so if my only emotionally disturbing situation this holiday season surrounded the ethics of hiring out the building of a gingerbread house to dethrone the queen of builds, I’d take it.
I must have been lost in thought when the mayor moved his giant face—the one on the banner—away from the winning gingerbread house, because the horrified cries from the people of Pine Lakes was my only hint that something was amiss.
My eyes snapped forward, but people had already jumped to their feet in front of me, and I couldn’t see what the problem was. Bless my Italian roots, but we were generally small people. My mom was five two, and Gram was five feet tall only in stilettos, which to my knowledge hadn’t happened in this century. I didn’t know how tall my dad was because everyone looks tall when you’re a child, and that was the last time I’d seen him. But judging from the fact that my short little self couldn’t see over the rows of people blocking my view of the winning house, clearly he hadn’t done me any favors.
I stood on my toes and tried to see as people talked over each other with outraged exclamations of unfairness. Had Mrs. Daniels lost after all and that was what they thought was unfair? Or were they simply saying it was unfair that she did win, even though they couldn’t possibly be shocked by it?
Oh! Maybe it was something else entirely. Had they finally picked a kid as the winner? GOOD. I’d be happy to see that, not shocked and sickened like the rest of these loony tunes.
